Description
Book SynopsisWinds through the wreck of longing and loss, navigating the strains of curious beauty with flashes of electrifying clarity. Stripping the burdens of unknowing fear, the author has found his way into a voice of energy and spontaneity, into a form of urgency and detail.
Trade Review"Like philosophical thinkers from Aristotle to Woody Allen, Berg ... frets over the unanswerable questions of human existence, metaphorically suggested by the unfinished equation of his latest collection's title. X= records one man's inward search for the meaning of his own life as he approaches old age... Berg's skill and desperate zeal make reading X= a compelling experience." -- Library Journal "[Berg explores] difficulty understanding his aging, his fear of women, and the world's changing economic, racial, and sexual politics. Berg ... dramatizes the speaker's awareness of this difficulty with Zen-like detachment and provides no easy solutions." -- Publishers Weekly "...a beautifully haunting and beautifully produced collection. ... Berg's programme is assisted by the panache of his style, and the bravery of his existential philosophy." --Stride Magazine ADVANCE PRAISE "I can't recall any work (not even Notes from the Underground) given over more to such fierce concentration on and exploration of the self--the wounded, frightened, frantic self. It is, to say the obvious, immensely, harrowingly powerful." -- Theodore Weiss "I can't think of anything in literature that reveals the working of a man's mind as clearly and fully as these poems do... Maybe parts of Emerson's journal come close. Maybe some of the autobiographical passages in Henry Miller's writing. At any rate I am genuinely impressed and moved... Over and over your thoughts strike a sympathetic chord in me." -- Hayden Carruth
